Archive

The Fate of Civil Liberties in National Crises

The system I would want is I would want an assurance that if some extraordinary measure has to be put in place temporarily to deal with a temporary crisis, that the word “temporary” will in fact continue to apply. And I will add that this is a moment when I really wish we had a functioning Congress.

Managing Online Partisan Conflict in r/politics with CivilServant

Liberal users comprise a larger percentage of these r/politics users, while conservatives will comprise a smaller percentage. Through those users and through their voting, they can control what is seen and what is not seen. So a liberal user, as a block, will downvote more often than not something they don’t agree with necessarily.

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.

Political Thought on the Just Rebellion, part 4

When we talk about rebellion, we’re usually talking about thought that is couched against the supposed rationality of the great revolutions of the modern era.

Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

I think the obvious thing to do with one computer per planet is fix climate change before it destroys agriculture and leaves billions of people to starve. That seems like a fairly reasonable kind of an objective. You know, there are all kinds of little optimizations you could do with these things, but fundamentally the big unsolved challenges that humanity faces are climate change and resource scarcity.

The Conversation #32 – The Conversation and the Election

It’s like we’ve got all these proxy wars going, where people are fighting bitterly over these things. And if you could sort of go back to the original global conflict almost, of ideas, I think you’d get to some interesting arational assumptions. Some of which would be different. Some of which might be very similar. And then you’d wonder why the hell are these proxy wars going on?

From Biomolecular Computing to Internet Democracy

My main point is that Internet technology today does not support the right of assembly, and therefore it cannot and does not support democracy. The reason is that even though we can easily form groups on Google, Facebook, you name it, we don’t know who the people on the group are.